Journals, Articles, and Text Resources

An extraordinary compilation of the plants used by North American native peoples for medicine, food, fiber, dye, and a host of other things. Anthropologist Daniel E. Moerman has devoted 25 years to the task of gathering together the accumulated ethnobotanical knowledge on more than 4000 plants. More than 44,000 uses for these plants by various tribes are documented here. This is undoubtedly the most massive ethnobotanical survey ever undertaken, preserving an enormous store of information for the future. -Amazon

The Cherokees call The Trail of Tears Nunda'utsun'yi, or "The Place Where the People Cried". Jesse Smoke, his mother, and his sisters are forced to abandon their home, their land, and their possessions when they and several thousand other Cherokees are forced west on The Trail of Tears. Illustrations. - Google Books_____________________________________________________When thousands of Cherokees were forced west by settlers in the 1830s, they named the path they followed the Trail of Tears. This powerful fictionalized journal retraces one young Native American boy's trek down that lonesome way.

Hardcover, 203 pagesPublished June 1st 2001 by Scholastic Inc.Original Title - The Journal of Jesse Smoke : A Cherokee Boy, Trail of Tears, 1838 (My Name Is America) - Good Reads

Steven Newcomb (Shawnee-Lenape) is a legal scholar and advocate for Indigenous nations who has carried on a global campaign since 1992. That is when he and Birgil Kills Straight, a Traditional Headman and Elder of the Oglala Lakota Nation founded the Indigenous Law Institute and began challenging imperial Vatican documents from the fifteenth century. Those documents resulted in the decimation and domination of the Original Nations and Peoples of Mother Earth and thereby deprived the planet of life-ways, sustainable ecosystems, and Sacred Teachings. Newcomb’s book Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery was published in 2008, and it provides a powerful context for the documentary “The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code,” Directed by Sheldon Wolfchild (Dakota), and Co-Produced by Newcomb. The movie also features Mr. Birgil Kills Straight discussing the Seven Sacred Laws of the Oceti Sakowin.

A Speech given to some 8,000 people at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, Salt Lake City, Utah, October 19, 2015.

"At the dawn of the twenty-first century, America finds itself on the brink of a new racial consciousness. The old, unquestioned confidence with which individuals can be classified (as embodied, for instance, in previous U.S. census categories) has been eroded. In its place are shifting paradigms and new norms for racial identity. Eva Marie Garroutte examines the changing processes of racial identification and their implications by looking specifically at the case of American Indians." -Amazon.com

"American Indians must negotiate the cultural and psychological legacy of colonialism as they construct coherent, purposive individual and communal narratives. Analysis of the life stories of highly generative members of these groups who have emerged as leaders offers important insights for psychological adaptation in the context of the historical legacy of colonialism. Based on an interpretive analysis of the life stories of two California Indian tribal leaders, we posit a resilient-strength-based approach to narrative identity development to complement and counter the historical trauma discourse. Native American identity emerged as the major source of psychological resilience in the life stories analyzed. This identity manifested and was supported through a commitment to the wellness of tribal community, spiritual practices, and beliefs. For these men, their relationship to their grandmothers was central in molding their identities and serving as a source of resilience throughout their lives. As leaders of a federally unrecognized tribal group, they have adopted a narrative of survivance (Vizenor, 2008), which appears to buffer psychosocial stress and provide a resilient narrative identity. Based on these findings, we theorize an indigenous California Native psychology of resilience." -Lucio Cloud Ramirez & Phillip L.Hammack

"Zapotec farmers in the northern sierra of Oaxaca, Mexico, are highly successful in providing their families with abundant, nutritious food in an ecologically sustainable fashion, although the premises that guide their agricultural practices would be considered erroneous by the standards of most agronomists and botanists in the United States and Europe. In this book, Roberto González convincingly argues that in fact Zapotec agricultural and dietary theories and practices constitute a valid local science, which has had a reciprocally beneficial relationship with European and United States farming and food systems since the sixteenth century.González bases his analysis upon direct participant observation in the farms and fields of a Zapotec village. By using the ethnographic fieldwork approach, he is able to describe and analyze the rich meanings that campesino families attach to their crops, lands, and animals. González also reviews the history of maize, sugarcane, and coffee cultivation in the Zapotec region to show how campesino farmers have intelligently and scientifically adapted their farming practices to local conditions over the course of centuries. By setting his ethnographic study of the Talea de Castro community within a historical world systems perspective, he also skillfully weighs the local impact of national and global currents ranging from Spanish colonialism to the 1910 Mexican Revolution to NAFTA. At the same time, he shows how, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the sustainable practices of "traditional" subsistence agriculture are beginning to replace the failed, unsustainable techniques of modern industrial farming in some parts of the United States and Europe." - Amazon.com